What do you do when you bring together two of Hollywood’s biggest action actors — Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger — as well as one of the world’s biggest rappers and a lengthy list of top-tier Hollywood talent, yet still only manage to perform reasonably well in ticket sales? Of course, despite the absence of Arnold Schwarzenegger from the cast, you make a second one.

That’s what happened with Escape Plan, which isn’t everyone’s favourite Sylvester Stallone property. Despite this, 2018’s Escape Plan 2: Hades is presently killing ass on HBO, where it is sandwiched between the 15-minute short The Gift and the 2018 superhero blockbuster Aquaman in the top 5 streamed movies.

Sylvester Stallone played Ray Breslin, the co-owner of a corporation that evaluates the security of supermax prisons, in the 2013 film Escape Plan. Breslin agrees to test the security at a jail without knowing the location ahead of time, but when he arrives, he discovers that the warden he made the agreement with and the warden in charge of the prison aren’t the same person.

Breslin faces a former pupil in the sequel. When Breslin fires Jaspar Kimbral (Wes Chatham) for causing the death of an innocent person early in Escape Plan 2: Hades, the same spurned employee reappears as the warden of the prison Hades. Along with Stallone, 50 Cent (Power) and Lydia Hull return from the first film (Van Wilder).

Dave Bautista (Guardians of the Galaxy), Xiaoming Huang (The Message), and Jesse Metcalfe (Guardians of the Galaxy) are among the newcomers to the fold (Desperate Housewives).

Unlike its predecessor, Escape Plan 2 was released on video-on-demand. It did have a limited theatrical release outside of the United States, grossing $17.6 million. While the first film included famous stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sam Neill (Jurassic Park), Vinnie Jones (Snatch), Vincent D’Onofrio (Men in Black), and Jim Caviezel (The Thin Red Line), the sequel’s star power was comparatively limited.

Most reviews seemed to agree that the nostalgia of seeing Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in key roles in the same picture carried the film’s few positive aspects. With that nostalgia-fueled pairing gone, the critics’ rating for Escape Plan dropped from 50% to an embarrassing 8% for Escape Plan 2: Hades. The sequel was deemed predictable, uninteresting, and incomprehensible by critics .This, of course, did not stop Stallone, Bautista, 50 Cent and more to return for the following year’s Escape Plan: The Extractors.